Samuel Butler

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

No thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation, no intention; let it settle itself.

Those who attain to any excellence commonly spend life in some single pursuit, for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

A continual feast of commendation is only to be obtained by merit or by wealth: many are therefore obliged to content themselves with single morsels, and recompense the infrequency of their enjoyment by excess and riot, whenever fortune sets the banquet before them.

O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity’s mind and were willing to reveal it.

The Public is merely a multiplied “me”.

One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

Guilt, regret, resentment, sadness and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence.